By sharing our proposals the cutting edge of scientific thought will no longer be hidden from view for several years and that will allow us to make more rapid progress … I think having examples of grants available to young scientists has the potential to help them learn how to write good proposals (and other folks seemtoagree) and therefore decrease the importance of grantsmanship relative to cool science in the awarding of limited funds.

I see no benefit to writing bids such as this in private, other than hiding the process by which I write grant applications. The projects I propose and the outputs they generate are all open source and usually promote some variation of openness (open access/source/education/data), so why not start with the writing of the bid? Perhaps someone will be generous enough to contribute in some way or even learn something from being able to see the bids in their raw state. It also stakes a claim on the nature of the proposal, too and with a CC license, the idea is sufficiently ‘protected’.

This is a contentious issue and clearly not everyone is going to be happy to open up their research bids in this way – typical concerns relate to the possibility of ideas being “stolen” by competitors. What do you think? Is this something you’d consider doing with your bids?